The aluminum/silicon/iron alloy containing by weight 4 to 8% aluminum, 6 to 11% silicon and the balance iron is called commonly Sendust and is known as an excellent "soft" magnetic material having a high permeability, a desirable hardness and a large electric resistivity.
Because of these characteristics, it is highly suitable, for instance, as magnetic-head core materials, especially with high-frequency inputs and where wear resistance is important. Because of its hardness and brittleness, however, this alloy has the disadvantage that it is not plastically machinable. For this reason, the practice used heretofore to fabricate flakes of the Sendust alloy is to mechanically slice a cast ingot of the alloy into pieces and then to grind each piece into a desired thickness. Because of the brittleness of the alloy, however, the slicing and finishing procedure unavoidably gives rise to chipping and, as a consequence, the yield of satisfactory products has been relatively low.
Another method practiced is to comminute a cast ingot into a powder of a particle size, say, in the order of 10 microns and then to compact a mass of the powder with a binder under application of a pressure which must be as high as 18 to 21 tons/cm.sup.2 to obtain a desired product of the alloy. These procedures, too, are relatively complicated and have made the products expensive.